Amongst the lineup of documentaries White Pine Pictures has coming down the pipe, company principal Peter Raymont is in development with what he describes as the ‘love of my life project.’

The Quest, a six-part, one-hour series that visits spiritual sites around the world, ones like Ayres Rock that predate organized religion, is an HDTV project presold to TVOntario and NHK in Japan.

To be produced and partly directed by Raymont, the series is budgeted at $600,000/hour, slightly more expensive than it would be if it were shot conventionally. ‘But because it’s an innovative medium, it’s more likely to get funded,’ says Raymont who was recently in Banff negotiating a deal with A&E to help complete the series financing. ‘Everyone’s looking for a good HDTV project,’ he confirms.

Another hot doc on the White Pine slate is The Burlesque, a two-hour history of the subversive art form that’s been degraded over the past few decades.

‘It’s a celebration of women taking control – women who said ‘fuck you’ to the establishment,’ says Raymont, who’s producing the project with partner and director Lindalee Tracey, who was a dancer as a teenager.

Budgeted at $800,000, the film, which has been in the works for more than a year, will interweave interviews with past and present Burlesque performers with archival footage of such icons as Josephine Baker.

The History Channel and Canal D in Quebec have first window, with Bravo! holding second.

Having just received 30% of its budget from Telefilm, the doc will start shooting this fall in France, England, the U.S. and Canada. ‘We’re shooting in locations where it was performed,’ says Raymont.

More imminently, Graveyard Shift, a six-part, half-hour doc series that takes ‘a rollicking plunge into the neon world of the midnight worker,’ as described on its one sheet, premieres July 5 on Life Network.

Each episode, set in Toronto, follows three increasingly dramatic subjects ranging from a raccoon wrangler and all-night funeral directors to a rookie, lesbian police officer and private eye.

‘It gets beneath the surface of the characters,’ says Raymont who jointly produced and directed the series with Tracey.

In Banff, Rayment was also trying to interest The Learning Channel in the series, which is budgeted at $100,000 per half-hour and could also be sold as a format.

Finally, as a follow-up to Raymont’s 1988 Genie Award-winning doc The World is Watching (CBC), an expose on how news in third-world countries gets distorted by first-world media, Raymont is in development on The World Stopped Watching, for which he intends to return to Nicaragua to see what’s happened since the Reagan years.

The one-hour project has received $95,000 from SIDA, which Raymont says may deter the CBC from partnering on it.

Meantime, the doc producer, who has a library of roughly 150 hours, has been selling a lot of his older works to The Documentary Channel, which pays $3,000/hour for the first year launching this fall.

LGT brings Tracker to T.O.

In a move to avoid the Teamsters, Lions Gate Television has chosen Toronto over Vancouver to shoot its latest outer-worldly series Tracker.

Going to camera July 19, the 22-part, one-hour series starring Adrian Paul (Highlander), follows the adventures of an intergalactic bounty hunter and his earthly female sidekick. The duo track down hundreds of escaped convicts from outer space who have been transported to Chicago, where they traffic in every kind of criminal activity imaginable.

Gil Grant (Relic Hunter) is the series’ show-runner and executive producer.

Broadcast rights to the series, budgeted at roughly $1.3 million an episode, are in the process of being sold to Citytv.

Ira Bernstein, a former Rysher Entertainment exec, is distributing the series domestically through his company Mercury Entertainment, based out of New York. Since Lions Gate closed its doors in its fledgling New York office earlier this year, Bernstein is the company’s sole New York contingent.

LGT is producing and has international rights.

Polley shouts love

While Sarah Polley’s The Claim was playing to the Canadian television community on Air Canada flights carrying Banff festival delegates in early June, the young but prolific actress was directing again on her third, and perhaps dearest, short film.

Written and directed by Polley, I Shout Love tells the story of a woman who convinces her long-time, live-in boyfriend to stay with her for a final 24 hours, before leaving her for another women, so she can capture on video the best moments of their relationship.

Shot on DVD and 35mm in a loft in Toronto June 9-15, the film, which has been presold to CBC, Showcase and WTN, stars stage actor Kristen Thomson and Matthew Ferguson (Lilies), with a guest appearance from Julian Richings (The Zack Files).

Meredith Caplan (Pretender) and Jennifer Weiss (Jack and Jill) are producing.

Natali makes comeback on Toronto shoot

Strike or no strike, as the SAG contract deadline approaches, U.S. shoots in Toronto are wrapping like wildfire.

Company Man, produced by Pandora, is director Vincenzo Natali’s big comeback after his success on Cube.

Considered Natali’s first major feature, Company Man, written by U.S. newcomer Brian King and starring Jeremy Northam (An Ideal Husband), Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels), Timothy Webber and Canadian Nigel Bennett (Lexx), tells the story of an out-of-work accountant who joins a multinational corporation as a company spy. In his new identity, he encounters a beautiful woman who reveals that his activities are really a ruse to brainwash him, and from there the action begins.

The film began shooting on location in Toronto and at Cinespace May 4 and wraps June 29.

Wendy Grean is the Canadian producer on board, accompanied by Hunt Lowry, Paul Federbush and Casey La Scala.

Pandora is distributing internationally and Miramax has U.S. rights. Alliance Atlantis Communications holds Canadian rights for all Miramax product.

Also wrapping in Toronto June 29 is Showtime’s MOW Our America. Starring Roderick Pannell and Brandon Hammond as LeAlane Jones and Lloyd Newman, the two teenage boys who in the early 1990s picked up umpteen awards for a radio documentary on their lives in the Chicago ghetto (The Wall). Shortly after the piece aired, two kids living in ‘The Wall’ were convicted for throwing a four-year-old out of a 14th-storey window. The two juveniles were charged with murder and sent to an adult jail, setting a new precedent in Chicago. Our America is based on Jones’ and Newman’s follow-up documentary on the incident.

Irma P. Hall (Soul Food) is also starring in the film, shooting in and around Toronto since May 28.

Ernest Dickerson is directing.

Looking for money in all the wrong places

The last way one would ever think of paying off a student loan is to make a movie about it, but recent Trent University graduate Michael Johnston has been doing just that.

For more than two years, the young and aspiring filmmaker has been piecing together the ‘comedic documentary,’ appropriately titled My Student Loan, with some funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Scenes include Johnston’s interactions with collection agencies and his belting out of hurtin’ country songs in front of banks in Peterborough.

He’s also documented the university’s capital development strategy, which has worked to close down colleges and centralize the school on the main campus – a result of the Ontario government’s cut of more than $2 billion of funding.

Johnston, who hosts a buy-and-sell trade show in Peterborough called Swap Shop, has already raised $97,000 of the film’s budget and was at Banff looking for the remaining $40,000.

‘It would be a nice closing scene to see me paying off my student loan, then driving off into the sunset.’ *